OpenStack Summit Sydney, November 6-8, 2017

Community leaders at the OpenStack Summit Sydney announced a new plan to overcome the hardest problem in open source today: integrating and operating open source technologies to solve real-world problems. The OpenStack Foundation and community are investing significant financial and technical resources in a four-part strategy to address integration of OpenStack and relevant open source technologies:

1) documenting cross-project use cases,

2) collaborating across communities, including upstream contributions to other open source projects,

3) fostering new projects at the OpenStack Foundation, and

4) coordinating end-to-end testing across projects.

The OpenStack Foundation and community announced several initiatives to support its integration strategy this week at the OpenStack Summit, including OpenLab, the Public Cloud Passport Program and the Financial Services Team.

Testing SDKs and Multi-Cloud Platforms with OpenLab
OpenLab is a community-led program to test and improve support for the most popular Software Development Kits (SDKs)—as well as platforms like Kubernetes, Terraform, Cloud Foundry and more—on OpenStack. The goal is to improve the usability, reliability and resiliency of tools and applications for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Huawei and Intel are both contributing full-time contributor resources and infrastructure to the project at its launch, and Open Telekom Cloud and Vexxhost are providing OpenStack-powered public cloud infrastructure for testing. OpenLab is in the formative stages and looking for additional contributors and feedback.

OpenStack Public Cloud Passport Program
The new Public Cloud Passport Program is a collaborative effort among the OpenStack Public Cloud working group to help prospective users quickly experience the freedom, performance and interoperability of open source infrastructure. The first step is an aggregation of free trial programs from participating OpenStack-powered public clouds, including Catalyst, City Network, Elastx, Home at Cloud, Memset, OVH, Scale Up Tech, Telefonica, UKCloud and Vexxhost.

There are now more than 25 OpenStack-powered public cloud providers operating across 60+ data centers on six continents. Find more OpenStack public cloud resources around the world in the Public Cloud Marketplace.

China UnionPay Launches OpenStack Community Financial Services Team
Many financial institutions are launching new business services and transitioning IT workloads to the cloud, yet there are stringent regulatory requirements for these infrastructure implementations. That’s why, according to the latest OpenStack User Survey, financial services is one of the fastest growing industries for OpenStack users from 2016 to 2017. Banco Santander, BBVA, China UnionPay, Commonwealth Bank, Insurance Australia Group, Postal Savings Bank of China, TD Bank and Wells Fargo have all spoken at OpenStack events.

At the Sydney Summit, China UnionPay announced the formation of a new community team to help identify and fill in the gaps for OpenStack adoption in the financial industry. China UnionPay operates an OpenStack-based financial cloud supporting many UnionPay business services and applications, including 50 million transactions per day. China UnionPay is looking to collaborate with global financial institutions to help document successful use cases, identify gaps and develop reference architectures for specific technologies, such as an SDN reference architecture for financial networks.

Strategic Focus Areas and New Projects
In addition to testing and use case development, the OpenStack Foundation expects to manage new open infrastructure projects as part of its integration strategy. The goal is to help organize the ecosystem and user community around problem domains, such as data center cloud infrastructure, edge infrastructure, container infrastructure and CI/CD. Historically, all software managed by the OpenStack Foundation has been part of the OpenStack project, but as the community organizes around these new domains, new projects may be managed independently with their own technical governance and branding. The strategy is to provide more focus and defined scope to the OpenStack core services while supporting these new use cases in parallel.

The OpenStack Foundation expects to announce new projects and events to deliver on this strategy in the coming months.